Serendipity and Crispin Glover

Despite the affirmation in the previous post, I did indeed miss What Is It? For one thing, I didn't realize until this past Thursday that I'd read the calendar wrong and the screening was this Sunday and not December 17th. Lord knows how I mixed that up. At any rate, I went to buy tickets online (a rare thing for Anthology Film Archives to offer) Friday evening, only to find that none were available. Hope springs eternal, and I trundled off into NYC Sunday afternoon anyway.

The screening and related slideshow, Q&A, etc. started at 7 PM. I arrived at 5 PM, putting me second on the standby line. I thought I saw MD'A while I was standing in line, though a look at his screening log says he wasn't there; I did, however, catch a glimpse of Crispin Glover waltzing into the Anthology, umbrella in hand. Two hours later, with sore knees and chilly hands, the people in the standby line are informed that, sorry, no available seats. I cursed, shrugged and headed inside to purchase a ticket for Robert Frank's Me and My Brother instead. The change of plans left me with some time to kill before my train, so I went beer browsing, looking for any unusal or interesting stuff to jump out at me.

I grabbed a Goose Island Matilda for the train ride home and then wandered around the Lower East side for an hour. One place had Rogue Dad's Little Helper Malt Liquor (anybody had this? any good?), which I came close to buying, but something told me to hold out a little longer. At 9:58, two minutes before closing time, I drifted into the Whole Foods in Union Square and beelined towards the beer. There, sitting on the shelf like it had been waiting for me the whole time, was the thing I knew in my heart of hearts I'd been searching for the whole time: Stone '06 Vertical Epic Ale. Three twenty-two ounce bottles was all they had, so I up & cleaned 'em out, panting like a junkie the whole way to the counter.

Finding those made the whole night worth it. And, had I made the Glover screening, I wouldn't have found the Stone, as the shebang didn't get out until well after 10. Ain't it nice when one thwarted opportunity leads to an even more interesting one?